Friday, January 13, 2006

Declining value of Internet real estate?

Trying to remember the actual adress for a given web-site (and maybe miss), takes more time than just googling the right keywords in the first place.

Dot com domains are popular, all right, but the ratio of good, free domain names to taken ones are getting worse all the time.. Wich makes the lengths some people go to to secure themselves a pristine domain prospect seem somewhat disproportionate. There are at least ten new TLD's in the process of being reviewed for acceptance at all times.. It's not that we have all the TLD's we will ever need. But it's getting kind of ridiculous with all the new proposed top-levels.. Who REALLY needs another .pro, .museum, .coop or .aero? Not to mention the slightly funny .xxx? Porn sites already account for a sizeable chunk of the registered .com adresses, and it's not like we're out of variations of surefire words like (hot, slutty, steaming, grand-, midgets) .com just yet.. If people wanted an .com adress they could, and still will, get an, at pretty nice entry-level prices too. I got myself a prefectly okay (albeit nonce-word-ish) adress for a price of less than a cinema ticket, a year!

Adresses are pretty cheap to begin with, but still, the price some of the most expensive adresses are pretty silly, $7,5 million (pre-bubble in 1999, but still.. prices are climbing yet again) for business.com is a bit more than I can bring myself to believe.

A serious name is important, but most i find .com adresses a bit overrated, as the uniqueness of them are declining all the time.

There are lots of alternative names, or if one choose to think outside the .com box. The way the most popular TLD's are unique will be diluted by more extensive population of other TLD's.

Another thing that have annoyed me slightly (and for some webmasters, caused much grief), is the practice of domain kiting and sniping. Two minutes of late pay, and someone else suddely have all your visitors. It have removed my favourite oldschool game website from its dot-com adress to [new-adress].org, and always causes me to miss the first or second try, every once in a while i pop in.

Wich is reason for even more irritation. When the wrong URL is entered, an obviously low quality, portal-cum-searchengine pops up. It is even more aggravating than the blank bowserpage for empty urls. Every moment spent on that site is effectively a waste of my own time, it usually makes me spend from 5 seconds up to a minute minutes, to see what kind of page i have surfed onto. The other problem is that I'm generating money for those domain-sning webmasters..

It's really annoying Bob too. It is a largescale machinebased exploitation of the domain naming system, and what's more, in the long term, it would really benefit the domain name industry if there were real content on those pages, since all the current state of affairs do for me as a internet user, is to deflate a given domain name's value. Wich again put even more power in the hands of search engines. (Not bad per se, I really don't like the way it is happening).